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Dallas Morgan Listeners are taken to a Colorado mountain community by Betta’s charming narration, where sisters Ellie and Meg Christie, who own bookstores, reluctantly go on a joint blind date that their cousin Lorna has set up. The sisters and other family members go out to prove Meg’s innocence when her date is later found slain and she is made the main suspect. As the number of suspects increases, Betta strikes the ideal mix between humor and suspense, making her the ideal complement for this subject. She skillfully crafts a group of likable and entertaining characters, emphasizing each one’s unique qualities. Her precise pacing makes sure that the clever dialogue shines throughout as the plot progresses seamlessly. The outcome is a charming mystery with an unexpected denouement.

– Charlotte Rivera, Editor, NY

It was not charisma that made Martin Baron the most well-known editor in American journalism. He acknowledges in his memoir “Collision of Power” that he was known to be “dour and taciturn,” and I cannot think of a better way to characterize his reading of this audiobook’s prologue and epilogue. But like a cunning editor, Baron assigns the remainder to Liev Schreiber, who portrayed Baron in the 2015 Oscar-winning film “Spotlight,” which was about the Boston Globe reporters who exposed the Catholic Church’s sex abuse scandal.

And who can blame Baron for not wanting to go through the hell he went through while heading The Washington Post for more than eight years—from threats of death to the Post’s actual murder, the writer Jamal Khashoggi? Just thinking back on all the current journalistic arguments—such as whether to publish Edward Snowden’s revelations or how to cover Hillary Clinton’s emails—becomes a bit taxing, even for the listener. As befitting a prominent advocate of journalistic “objectivity,” Baron divulges very little about his personal life, whereas Schreiber presents the facts. (When citing the former president, I noticed an occasional Trumpian tone, but Schreiber doesn’t go all Alec Baldwin.)

When Baron glances at people on the masthead above and below him, it’s extremely insightful. Fun anecdotes about his field reporters abound, including a memorable Spy vs. Spy story in which Post journalists battled Project Veritas personnel who were attempting to entrap them. Baron also gained a close-up view of Jeff Bezos’ workplace after the latter acquired The Post a year into Baron’s editorship, even though he doesn’t have any new information regarding Trump. Although Baron isn’t exactly an unbiased observer of his former employer, I found his perspective to be convincing. Baron’s portrait is mainly positive; following a meeting with Bezos, he portrays The Post’s political team as “practically levitating out of the room.” According to Baron, managing a newspaper was becoming a “almost unbearable burden,” and Bezos was presumably the finest owner The Post could have. Taking stock of the newspaper’s efforts during trying times and maybe contemplating a future where things for journalists don’t appear to be getting any easier.

– Emily Walker, Freelance Writer, NY

A teenage Safiya Sinclair looks out into the darkness of the Jamaican mountains, “the thick countryside where our first slave rebellion was born,” after her strict Rastafari father threatens to throw her out of the family home for not bowing to his verbal abuse. There, she sees the specter of a woman dressed in white, her dreadlocked head bowed “under the gaze of a Rastaman.” She understands that the woman is actually her, a sign of “the future that awaited me at my father’s hands.” While in Sinclair’s first memoir, “How to Say Babylon,” “all the rage had been smothered out of” this reoccurring apparition, the same cannot be said of the author, who seethes and roars and erupts with emotion throughout this profoundly moving story of growing up under her father’s violent and controlling hand — and of escaping it to become an award-winning poet. The golden rolling paper Esther carried for the ganja whose perfume “clung to me like I clung to Mom” and Sinclair’s vivid and rhythmic recollections of her mother’s laughing and calming touch as they “folded into each other in the living room” before school hover above the deep anguish and fury. Sinclair creates her own incantations, seemingly in response to her father’s oppressive doctrine, based on the wild landscapes of her childhood. These include the fishing village with its zinc-roofed shanties, hibiscus trees, and cinder blocks; further inland, the “towering blue mahoes and primeval ferns”; and the “serried and vigilant” mountain ridge of her later childhood. Her voice is as sensual as a siren song.

– Emma Rodriguez, Audiobook Enthusiast, MI